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The Rescuers
Margery Sharp
Bianca and Bernard, agents for The Prisoners' Aid Society of Mice, rescue prisoners and outwit villains in this enchanting story, made world-famous by the Walt Disney film.The Prisoners' Aid Society of Mice discusses the proposed rescue of a Norwegian poet from the terrible Black Castle. Miss Bianca, the pet white mouse belonging to the Ambassador's son, is sent to Norway on a mission to recruit the bravest Norwegian mouse she can find. She finds Nils, and brings him back triumphantly. Then she, Nils, and Bernard, a pantry mouse who falls in love with her, set off for the Black Castle. They set up home in a mousehole in the Chief Jailer's room, and narrowly avoid the jaws of Mamelouk the cruel Persian cat. Eventually they trick the cat and the jailer, and get into the prisoner's cell. A dramatic rescue via an underground river, and they are all free – and the Nils and Miss Bianca medal for bravery is struck in the mice's honour!
Copyright (#ulink_c1b3808b-c55a-5170-a525-f6ffe1e24ca6)
First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons and Co Ltd in 1959
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Text copyright © Margery Sharp 1959
Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Anne Fine 2010
Cover illustration © Emilia Dziubak 2016
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, 2016
Margery Sharp asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007364091
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007390700
Version: 2016-05-20
CONTENTS
Cover (#ucf4f95e2-74cc-50a0-a8fc-53a855a49d43)
Title Page (#ud711b1a3-b6c8-5880-9636-7614594ad2d7)
Copyright (#u6da887ec-2439-5f28-9389-c9e7600e7887)
Why You’ll Love This Book – by Anne Fine (#u0f19b21a-da0d-50fb-85a9-39bf0485ccb2)
Chapter One – The Meeting (#u820cd776-65f3-565b-a581-5ea8702c05fd)
Chapter Two – Miss Bianca (#u1ed89dc7-d2a6-55e4-bca0-8e02e6629162)
Chapter Three – In Norway (#u54df80a2-9fe4-59dd-963c-ae2f7ba1fb9c)
Chapter Four – The Voyage (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five – Marching Orders (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six – The Happy Journey (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven – The Black Castle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight – Waiting (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine – Cat and Mouse (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten – The Message (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven – The Other Way Out (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve – The Great Enterprise (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen – The Raft (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen – The End (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript by Nicholas Tucker (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Why You’ll Love This Book (#ulink_6c7947f3-54ee-5085-a6dc-e0a0b0d9141f)
by Anne Fine (#ulink_6c7947f3-54ee-5085-a6dc-e0a0b0d9141f)
If there’s a more enchanting story than The Rescuers, I’ve yet to read it. For fifty years now it’s been delighting children – along with any adult wise enough to snatch the chance to share it.
Yet it’s as fresh today as it has ever been. How could readers fail to warm to a book so full of comedy and heart? We meet three of the most heroic mice in literature: delicate Miss Bianca, who selflessly abandons her pampered life in a porcelain pagoda to journey over rough seas and barren lands to the hideous Black Castle from which no prisoner has ever escaped.
Along with her on this terrifying errand of mercy go two steadfast companions: kind, loyal Bernard from the kitchen pantry (already honoured for Gallantry in the Face of Cats); and Nils, a fearless Norwegian sailor who’s never happier than when braving storm-tossed waves in his sturdy sea boots.
How these resourceful mice set about their adventure is a wonder. For though Miss Bianca means well, she is unable to confess that Nils has taken her idle doodle of a garden party hat for an accurate map of the waterways they must traverse. (Luckily, Miss Bianca’s refined manners and sprightly grace serve her better in her encounters with the head jailor’s cat, the fierce, yet somewhat dim, Mamelouk.)
This is a book which, once discovered, is read over and over. Each detail enchants and fascinates: the deliciously comfortable walnut-shell chairs in the committee room of the mice’s Prisoners’ Aid Society; the desperate message from the dungeons, cunningly stuck with black treacle to Mamelouk’s fur; even the flowery poems that Miss Bianca feels compelled to write at moments of high emotion.
Right from the start, The Rescuers was hailed as a classic. Since then, Margery Sharp’s short masterpiece has enthralled, amused and enriched the reading lives of young people everywhere.
Don’t miss it!
Anne Fine
Anne Fine has won a host of literary prizes both here and abroad, and from 2001–3 she was the Children’s Laureate.
Visit her website at www.annefine.co.uk (http://www.annefine.co.uk)
Chapter One (#ulink_b18720be-1dbf-5a8f-a275-706e48231266)
THE MEETING (#ulink_b18720be-1dbf-5a8f-a275-706e48231266)
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” cried the Chairwoman Mouse, “we now come to the most important item on our autumn programme! Pray silence for the secretary!”
It was a full meeting of the Prisoners’ Aid Society. Everyone knows that the mice are the prisoner’s friend – sharing his dry breadcrumbs even when they are not hungry, allowing themselves to be taught all manner of foolish tricks, such as no self-respecting mouse would otherwise contemplate, in order to cheer his lonely hours. What is less well known is how splendidly they are organised. Not a prison in any land but has its own national branch of a wonderful, worldwide system. It is on record that long, long ago a Norman mouse took ship all the way to Turkey, to join a French sailor-boy locked up in Constantinople! The Jean Fromage Medal was struck in his honour.
The secretary rose. The chairwoman sat back in her seat, which was made from beautifully polished walnut shells, and fixed her clever eyes on his greying back. How she would have liked to put the matter to the meeting herself! An enterprise so difficult and dangerous! Dear, faithful old comrade as the secretary was, had he the necessary eloquence? But rules are rules.
She looked anxiously over the assembly, wondering which members would support her; there were at least a hundred mice present, seated in rows on neat matchbox benches. The Moot-house itself was a particularly fine one, a great empty wine cask, entered by the bung, whose splendid curving walls soared cathedral-like to the roof. Behind the speakers’ platform hung an oil painting, richly framed, depicting the mouse in Aesop’s Fable in his heroic act of freeing a captive lion.
“Well, it’s like this,” began the secretary. “You all know the Black Castle …”
Every mouse in the hall shuddered. The country they lived in was still barely civilised, a country of great gloomy mountains, enormous deserts, rivers like strangled seas. Even in its few towns, even here in the capital, its prisons were grim enough. But the Black Castle!
It reared up, the Black Castle, from a cliff above the angriest river of all. Its dungeons were cut in the cliff itself – windowless. Even the bravest mouse, assigned to the Black Castle, trembled before its great, cruel, iron-fanged gate.
From a front seat up spoke a mouse almost as old and rheumatic as the secretary himself. But he wore the Jean Fromage Medal.
“I know the Black Castle. Didn’t I spend six weeks there?”
Around him rose cries of “Hear, hear!” “Splendid chap!” and other encouragements.
“And did no good there,” continued the old hero gravely. “I say nothing of the personal danger – though what a cat that is of the Head Jailer’s! – twice natural size, and four times as fierce! – I say only that a prisoner in the Black Castle, a prisoner down in the dungeons, not even a mouse can aid. Call me defeatist if you will—”
“No, no!” cried the mice behind.
“—but I speak from sad experience. I couldn’t do anything for my prisoner at all. I couldn’t even reach him. One can’t cheer a prisoner in the Black Castle—”
“But one can get him out,” said the chairwoman.
There was a stunned silence. In the first place, the chairwoman shouldn’t have interrupted. In the second, her proposal was so astounding, so revolutionary, no mouse could do more than gape.
“Mr Secretary, forgive me,” apologised the chairwoman. “I was carried away by your eloquence.”
“As rules seem to be going by the board, you may as well take over,” said the secretary grumpily.
The chairwoman did so. There is nothing like breeding to give one confidence: she was descended in direct line from the senior of the Three Blind Mice. Calmly sleeking her whiskers—
“It’s rather an unusual case,” said the chairwoman blandly. “The prisoner is a poet. You will all, I know, cast your minds back to the many poets who have written favourably of our race – ‘Her feet beneath her petticoat like little mice stole in and out’ – Suckling, the Englishman – what a charming compliment! Thus do not poets deserve specially well of us?”
“If he’s a poet, why’s he in jail?” demanded a suspicious voice.
The chairwoman shrugged velvet shoulders.
“Perhaps he writes free verse,” she suggested cunningly.
A stir of approval answered her. Mice are all for people being free, so that they too can be freed from their eternal task of cheering prisoners – so that they can stay snug at home, nibbling the family cheese, instead of sleeping out in damp straw on a diet of stale bread.
“I see you follow me,” said the chairwoman. “It is a special case. Therefore we will rescue him. I should tell you also that the prisoner is a Norwegian. Don’t ask me how he got here, really no one can answer for a poet! But obviously the first thing to do is to get in touch with a compatriot, and summon him here, so that he may communicate with the prisoner in their common tongue.”
Two hundred ears pricked intelligently. All mice speak their own universal language, as well as that of the country they live in, but prisoners as a rule spoke only one.
“We therefore fetch a Norwegian mouse here,” recapitulated the chairwoman, “dispatch him to the Black Castle—”
“Stop a bit,” said the secretary.
The chairwoman had to.
“No one more than I,” said the secretary, “admires the chairwoman’s spirit. But has she, in her feminine enthusiasm, considered the difficulties? ‘Fetch a mouse from Norway’ – in the first place! How long will that take, even if possible?”
“Remember Jean Fromage!” pleaded the chairwoman.
“I do remember Jean Fromage. No mouse worthy of the name could ever forget him,” agreed the secretary. “But he had to be got in touch with first, and travelling isn’t as easy as it used to be.”
How quickly a public meeting is swayed! Now all the chairwoman’s eloquence was forgotten; there was a general murmur of assent.
“In the old days,” continued the secretary, “when every vehicle was horse-drawn, a mouse could cross half Europe really in luxury. How delightful it was to get up into a well-appointed coach, make a snug little nest among the cushions, slip out at regular intervals to a nose-bag! Farm carts were even better; there one had room to stretch one’s legs, and meals were simply continuous! Even railway carriages, of the old wooden sort, weren’t too uncomfortable—”
“Now they make them of metal,” put in a mouse at the back. “Has anyone here ever tried nibbling steel plate?”
“And at least trains were speedy,” went on the secretary. “Now, as our friend points out, they are practically impossible to get a seat in. As for motorcars, apart from the fact that they often carry dogs, in a motorcar one always feels so conspicuous. A ship, you say? We are a hundred miles from the nearest port! Without a single mail coach or even private carriage on the roads, how long would it take, Chairwoman, to cover a hundred miles in a succession of milk floats?”
“As a matter of fact,” said the chairwoman blandly, “I was thinking of an aeroplane.”
Every mouse in the hall gasped. An aeroplane! To travel by air was the dream of each one; but if trains were now difficult to board, an aeroplane was believed impossible!
“I was thinking,” added the chairwoman, “of Miss Bianca.”
The mice gasped again.
Everyone knew who Miss Bianca was, but none had ever seen her.
What was known was that she was a white mouse belonging to the ambassador’s son, and lived in the schoolroom at the embassy. Apart from that, there were the most fantastic rumours about her: for instance, that she lived in a porcelain pagoda: that she fed exclusively on cream cheese from a silver bonbon dish: that she wore a silver chain round her neck, and on Sundays a gold one. She was also said to be extremely beautiful, but affected to the last degree.
“It has come to my knowledge,” proceeded the chairwoman, rather enjoying the sensation she had caused, “that the ambassador has been transferred, and that in two days’ time he will leave for Norway by air! The Boy of course travels with him, and with the Boy travels Miss Bianca – to be precise, in the Diplomatic Bag. No one on the plane is going to examine that; she enjoys diplomatic immunity. She is thus the very person to undertake our mission.”
